THE POLICE ARRIVED, YAWNING AND BORED, AND IMMEDIATELY took Anna away with them to be questioned. Lena trailed behind them, for whatever reason; she was saying something about an ambulance. That took care of two of the uniformed officers, but left one behind to glare at me alongside my old friend Detective Shepard, who looked like he’d rather have swallowed a hive of bees than to be back on this campus again. By now he and I knew the drill; he didn’t even try to question me without my father, just left me to wallow while he examined the scene. The uniformed cop knocked a bike off its hook, and when it fell, it took down another, and another, slow and unstoppable, like a rhinoceros playing slow-motion dominoes. Then the dean of students arrived in pajamas and robe and a pair of neon trainers, and my father after that, bright-eyed and, as always, horribly bushy-tailed, and after a huddled conference amongst the adults, the whole awful parade of us walked up to the headmistress’s office in the clock tower on the hill, our shoes tracking slush and dirt into the paisley-carpeted entryway.
“Like I said, I’d rather question him at the station,” Detective Shepard said, as we stomped the snow off our feet.
The dean shook her head. “You already took away the girl. I’m lucky I got here before you vanished Mr. Watson here.”
“It’s not how it’s done—”
“They got me out of bed,” the dean said darkly. “After last year, with the Dobson boy, we’ve come up with a new way of handling these . . . situations. And that ‘new way’ hauled me out of my house at midnight on a weekday, so yes, we are handling it here. I have no idea why that child called the police. This is an internal matter.”
As everyone started up the stairs, bickering, my father hung behind. He looked as energetic as though he’d just drunk a pot of coffee and run a triathlon. I hated him a little bit right then. But I guess I had a lot of frustration to go around.
“So perhaps I should have picked you up when you asked me to,” he said.
“Probably.” I took off my gloves and stuffed them in my pockets. The clock tower offices were surprisingly warm.
He lifted an eyebrow. “No ‘Dad, why aren’t you taking this more seriously’? ‘Dad, why aren’t you cursing my name and wailing over our misfortune’?”
“Honestly?” I said. “I’ve been . . . pretty shitty, lately. I’m not going to tell you what to do. Just go ahead and be your weird self.”
“Thanks,” he said dryly. “But the detective looks a bit like he wants to disembowel you”—Shepard was waiting on the landing, watching us—“so shall we go on and be our weird selves in front of the firing squad? They might appreciate some of your wailing, if you want to try it out.”
The head of school’s office took up the top floor of the tower, and we clustered inside of it, everyone waiting for their cue to sit. The headmistress herself was an imposing presence in a crowd of exhausted adults. She was scrubbed clean, perched at the edge of her desk in a suit, while her assistant poured coffee out into ceramic cups.
“Ms. Williamson,” my father said, extending a hand. “James Watson, Jamie’s father. It’s a pleasure. I only wish we could be meeting under better circumstances.”
“Yes,” she said simply. She had been head of school last year as well. I don’t know how often she actually encountered “better circumstances” when it came to dealing with me. “Please sit, all of you. Harry, hand around the coffee, then go handle the phone. We’ll have calls before tonight is over.”
“Can you update us if they find the money?” I asked, sitting down on her settee. “Once they find out what happened?”
The headmistress and Detective Shepard exchanged a look. “We’ll see,” he said, finally.
“Jamie.” The dean of students pulled an iPad from her bag. She had a rattle sticking up next to it; she’d left small kids at home. “I’ve pulled your records. The events of last year notwithstanding—”
“He was cleared,” my father interrupted. “That matter’s handled. We have the good detective here to thank for that.”
The good detective rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, and said nothing. I thought, not for the first time, that maybe we should have had him help us bring in Bryony Downs. Instead of, well, telling him about it. Two days after the fact.
“Notwithstanding,” the dean said, peering over her glasses, “Jamie’s had a good academic year. APs, high grades. And then the last few days. I’ve looked at your teachers’ gradebooks from this week—it says here that you did very poorly on a presentation that was nearly half of your semester grade for physics? The note says that you went off on a three-minute tangent about space elevators.”
“Space elevators?” I searched my memory of the presentation to find that I didn’t really have one. “Oh.”
“Oh,” the dean said. “Yes. And you skipped your classes yesterday—you didn’t hand in any of your work? You had a response paper due in AP English. You missed a quiz in AP calc. Your French teacher says you sent him a bizarre email about him eating snails that looked like you put it through a translate program a few times—Monsieur Cann’s note under ‘discipline’ expresses his dismay, and he also would like to know if you’re a vegetarian and were offended by last week’s lesson on French delicacies. Does any of this ring a bell?”
My father clapped a hearty hand on my shoulder. “Eating snails is barbaric, isn’t it, Jamie?”
I really, really should have changed my email password. How had I been so stupid? How had I been so in my own head that I hadn’t taken the one practical step that was actually in my power?
“This is erratic behavior, you see,” the headmistress said, more gently than maybe I deserved. “And now a girl’s been stolen from. Did you have any contact with her before tonight?”
I shook my head.
“Anna was attending a party thrown by Lena Gupta, your friend—”
Detective Shepard muttered something like “known associate.”
I sunk my head into my hands. “She sat at our lunch table the other day, but I didn’t talk to her,” I said through my fingers. “The girl, I mean. Anna. I didn’t send those emails. Someone broke into my room and deleted my physics presentation so I stayed up all night redoing it, and so I didn’t sleep much, and . . . okay, yes, I think space elevators are really cool and so that part is completely my fault, or my subconscious’s fault maybe, or I was like, lack-of-sleep hallucinating, but someone broke into my room the next day while I was napping and hacked into my laptop—”
“You didn’t tell me this,” my father said.
“—they sprayed Diet Coke all over my room and into my laptop and now my girlfriend hates me and Lena wouldn’t give me the AP English homework until I went to Tom’s party, and I am really, really tired, I have no idea what day it is, and honestly I know Lucien Moriarty is behind all of this, it’s all his fault.”
The dean and the detective and the headmistress all peered at me.
“You’re saying that a man named Moriarty ate your homework,” the dean said. “So to speak.”
Detective Shepard cleared his throat. “It isn’t totally impossible.”
“And then you attended an illicit party, on a school night, at which a girl is claiming you stole a thousand dollars of her money,” the headmistress said. “I should remind you that that’s the reason why we’re here. I don’t usually call emergency midnight meetings about space elevators.”
“It isn’t totally impossible.” Shepard was in apparent psychic pain from having to say the words again.
“The space elevator?” my father asked.
“That it was a Moriarty.”
“See!” I pointed at Shepard. “You were there, last year. You remember.”
“Can someone please just bring in Charlotte Holmes?” he asked. “Where is she, anyway? Usually if something blows up or someone’s hurt, the two of you are lurking together around the corner, talking about your feelings.”
The dean of students’ phone rang. “Rang” was a generous word; it was sort of a quacking sound. “That’s my babysitter,” she muttered. “How long will this take?”
“Miss Holmes didn’t come back to school this year,” the headmistress said shortly. “This is about Mr. Watson alone.”
Her assistant knocked on the half-open door. “Ms. Williamson? The museum curator is on the phone for you? And also there’s a student here named Lena Gupta—”
“Yes,” she sighed. “Of course there is. Show her in.”
Lena swept in in her furry coat. She unwound her scarf as she spoke, around and around and around. “Anna is fine. You can call to check if you don’t believe me. She says she bought the pills from Beckett Lexington in the cafeteria, and that he gave her a sampler, and that he said he’d see her in the access tunnels tonight to deliver the rest, so that’s what the money was for.” She frowned. “Anyway I had the cops call an ambulance once we got outside. I was really worried about her. Can I have a cup of that coffee?”
The room exploded.